BUS1050 introduces students to the foundational logic of microeconomics: how individual consumers and firms make decisions under scarcity, and how those countless individual decisions add up to the market outcomes we observe every day — prices, production levels, who gets what, and how efficiently resources end up allocated. The course builds a working toolkit for analyzing those decisions and applying it to situations students encounter in business and everyday life.
How individuals and firms make optimizing decisions
Core topics
- Consumer optimizing behavior: How individual consumers allocate limited income across goods and services to maximize satisfaction, including the logic of diminishing marginal utility and how price and income changes shift consumption choices
- Firm optimizing behavior: How individual firms decide what and how much to produce, choosing input combinations and output levels that maximize profit given costs, technology, and the market they compete in
- Supply and demand: The core analytical framework for understanding how individual consumer and firm decisions aggregate into market-level outcomes — equilibrium price, equilibrium quantity, and how markets respond to shocks
- Market efficiency: Evaluating when the combined outcome of individual decisions produces an efficient allocation of resources, and identifying the conditions under which markets fail to do so
- Fairness and individual decisions: Examining the relationship between individually rational decisions and broader questions of fairness and equity in market outcomes — efficiency and fairness are related but distinct standards for judging a market result
- Real-world application: Identifying and applying microeconomic principles to actual business and policy situations, building the habit of recognizing the economic logic underlying everyday decisions
BUS1050 assignments include supply-and-demand analyses, market efficiency evaluations, and real-world application papers
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Frequently asked questions
Supply-and-demand mechanics describe what happens in a market, but they don't by themselves explain whether what happens is good. BUS1050 is structured around optimizing behavior specifically because every market outcome — the price you pay, the wage a worker earns, the quantity a firm produces — is the aggregate result of many individual consumers and firms each making the best decision available to them given their constraints. Understanding that underlying optimizing logic is what allows students to evaluate, rather than just describe, market outcomes: it's the basis for asking whether a market price reflects true scarcity and value (efficiency) and separately whether the resulting distribution of goods, income, or opportunity seems just (fairness). These are related but genuinely distinct questions — a market can be efficient without being widely regarded as fair, and recognizing that distinction is essential for anyone using microeconomic reasoning in real business or policy contexts, where decisions routinely have to weigh efficiency gains against fairness concerns.